A LAWYER WHO HAS HIMSELF FOR A CLIENT…
Do It Yourself Marketing
A fella once said that if you’re smart enough to be a lawyer or an accountant, then you’re smart enough to do your own marketing. Sure. And if you’re a lawyer or an accountant you’re smart enough to be a nuclear physicist, but that doesn’t make you one.
In fact, smart is not the issue. Knowledge, training and experience are what make the difference. Yes, indeed, you might be able to do your own marketing, and certainly certain aspects of it. But let’s look at all the options and the probable consequences of each.
· You can do nothing, and try to build a practice on just the base of your existing friends, associates and contacts. Maybe run a seminar or two, or write an article (can you do that on your own? Then do it.) Assuming that you have a wide circle of friends and contacts, ranging from college and graduate school to business associates, you might slowly build a practice. It’s been done before. But there are a few problems …
o It can take a long time, and it depends a lot on luck. It depends upon serendipity, which is terrific, but you can’t build a career or practice on serendipity.
o You have little control over the direction of your practice, unless, in the early stages, you can afford to turn down the clients that don’t fit into your idea of what you want the practice to be. Unless you’re lucky, the likelihood is that you’ll find yourself with clients you don’t really want, and clients that cost you more to serve than you make from them.
o You have to have some sense of how to use your contacts sensitively and appropriately. If you can do this instinctively or intuitively, it can work. If not, you’ll run long distances to get nowhere.
o In this highly competitive world, losing clients to more sophisticated competitors is almost a certainty. Just look at the marketing programs your successful competitors are using, and then tell yourself that you can do your own marketing.
· You can try doing a marketing program yourselves. Trial and error sometimes works, but it takes a great many trials and many expensive errors to get it right. Can you learn from a book, or by a careful reading of The Marcus Letter and similar publications? It can help, but often it’s like reading a book on tightrope walking. You wind up knowing everything about tightrope walking except how to do it. Remember Lamb’s Essay On A Roast Pig? When the peasant’s cottage burned down and roasted his pig, he found that he like the taste of roast pig. Thereafter, every time he wanted roast pig he burned his house down.
If you’re a startup or a sole practitioner, you’re in three full-time businesses…getting business, serving the clients, and managing the business. It can work – if you don’t need sleep. And soon enough you’ll find that there is, indeed, a professional skill in most marketing practices.
· You can hire a consultant to set up a marketing program for you, and show you how to do it. If you get the right consultant, and you have the talent – or at least, the proclivity – you can get a lot done. But you also need the time to do it, and the dedication. Marketing isn’t a sometime thing. Either you do it or you don’t. If you do it on a whenever basis, it will work whenever the process feels like it, which is almost never. It takes commitment.
· You can hire a consultant to set up a program and train your staff in how to participate – building a marketing culture – and then hire a lower priced marketing person to manage and carry out the program. (I’ve done this successfully. It works.)
· You can hire an outside consultant on a sustaining basis. This doesn’t absolve you and your staff from having to participate in the process, because your input is necessary to anything any marketing professional does for you. A non-lawyer or non-accountant can go a great distance toward moving a prospective client into your camp, but ultimately, in professional services, nobody hires a professional from a marketing campaign without the final sale being made by the professional who performs the service (would you hire a lawyer or an accountant from an ad or direct mail letter?). If you get the right consultant, there’s also the advantage of being able to control costs. You always know what you’re paying.
· You can hire a staff professional. In marketing, as with anything else, you get what you pay for, whether it’s an outside consultant or a staff person. An experienced outside consultant might cost you more because, presumably, you’re buying extensive experience and proven insights and talent. With the right person, you pay more and you get more. And while you can’t always track costs as carefully as with an outside consultant (overhead, for example), the staff person more readily becomes part of your practice. The staff person comes to know your culture, your service, your practice, the personalities of your people, and so forth. With an outside consultant, you get a team with specialists in different skills. With a staff person, you either have to hire assistants or specialists, or outsource such processes as writing, press relations, and so forth.
These are the major options. You can mix them, of course (do-it-yourself, but with outside specialists from time to time, for example). But one thing is certain. Unless you recognize that in the competitive arena of professional services marketing is an integral part of firm management, you’re going to lose to competitors who do understand this.
Of course, you can run through the gamut of options to find the one that works best for you, but you’ll take a lot of time, and spend a lot of money, until you get it right. Think it through first. And don’t burn the house down just because you like roast pig.